Denmark Shooting: Not Just US, Even ‘Civilised’ West Is Facing More Gun Violence

What motivates a person to walk into a schoolroom and shoot children, or stroll through a mall shooting strangers?

At least three people died in a shooting at a mall in Copenhagen, Denmark, on 3 July. 

(Photo: Chetan Bhakuni/The Quint)

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Denmark is not the kind of country associated with weaponised violence. Even policemen here are not heavily armed, as is the case in the United States and, increasingly, India. They look like policemen, not soldiers of an invading army.

As such, the shooting spree in a mall in Copenhagen on 3 July, which left at least three people dead and several more injured, was much more out of place here than it would have been in the US, which, in 2021, reported 693 mass shootings (of which 303 resulted in no deaths), leaving 703 people dead and 2,842 injured. As against this tally of about two mass shootings per day in the US, the last mass shooting in Denmark took place in 2015, and it was motivated by Islamist bigotry.

• The shooting spree at a mall in Copenhagen on 3 July, which left at least three people dead and several more injured, was much more out of place in Denmark than it would have been in the US.

• What is it in the ‘civilised’ West then that motivates an ordinary person, with ordinary and individual grievances, to walk into a schoolroom and shoot down children, or stroll through a mall randomly shooting strangers?

• I believe that the West has been more likely to throw up alienated individuals who see others as a sheer obstruction.

• As opposed to political or religious violence, the sort of individual mass shootings that we are talking about seem to be more of a Western phenomenon.

US Setting the Trend for Mass Shootings?

This time, it appears that the culprit was a psychiatrically disturbed 22-year-old “ethnic Dane”, that is, a white person. However, whatever the immediate ‘cause’, mass shootings seem to have become a feature of ordinary life, with the US setting the trend. Many of these mass shootings do not have any clear political or ‘religious’ motivation. They seem to be the action of disturbed or dissatisfied individuals.

Now, one of the reasons why the Copenhagen shooting, in a very crowded mall, led to three deaths has to do with the fact that semi-automatic and automatic weapons are not sold to the public in places like Denmark. This is not the case in the US. Had the Copenhagen shooter been able to deploy a machine gun, as against the hunting rifle that he had, the casualties would have been in at least double figures.

This remains a factor, and it is a factor that distinguishes the US from much of Europe. That is also the reason, in my mind, why fewer and less fatal shootings take place in Europe, unless they are part of political terror, as was the case when the Christian-rightist terrorist, Anders Behring Breivik, shot down 69 left-leaning youth activists and injured 90 in Norway in 2011, or when an Islamist terrorist killed five and injured 11 in Strasbourg, France, in 2018. But having made this necessary distinction, one is still faced with the larger question: what is it that makes some people, sometimes with little or no political motivation, shoot down total strangers in an orgy of violence?

What Makes Violence So Easy?

It strikes me that despite the fact that many non-Western countries are afloat with weapons – usually supplied by Western countries – and that there is much political and religious violence in such non-Western countries, the sort of individual mass shootings that we are talking about seem to be more of a Western phenomenon, with the US leading the tally. Afghans, Somalis, Yemenis, etc, can kill each other for various reasons, but they seldom walk into a crowd and shoot randomly: the many murders and even massacres in the non-West are almost always due to political and religious extremism.

What is it in the ‘civilised’ West then that motivates an ordinary person, with ordinary and individual grievances, to walk into a schoolroom and shoot down children, or stroll through a mall randomly shooting strangers?

I am old-fashioned enough to consider that some of it has to do with the privileging of violent power in the entertainment industry, but this also applies to non-Western films, adventure books and serials. The usual answer to this point is that most of us who see films glorifying violence – and even the most innocent Marvel film finally ends with the hero bashing the villain into pulp, proving that sheer power matters – do not go out and beat other people up.

This is a valid point, and yet I believe that there is a culture of violence that seeps into the weaker or more perturbed minds, and predisposes them towards actions that might not have come ‘naturally’ to them on their own. We are, after all, a species particularly good at mimicking, hypersensitive to influence. But this, I concede, applies to the whole world, not just the West.

The Self vs Others

I believe that the West has been more likely to throw up alienated individuals who see others as a sheer obstruction because of a long and deep line of thinking in its mainstream philosophies, especially from the Enlightenment downwards. Ranging from Descartes to Sartre, and stopping only with post-holocaust philosophers, like Emmanuel Levinas, who consciously opposed this trend, there is a philosophical thread in European thinking that sees the individual self as coming into being opposed to other-selves, opposed even to the materiality of the world outside itself. Such a strong and absolute opposition between the self and the other does not exist in most other societies: the Chinese, for instance, never posit such an extreme opposition between being and the world (including other beings). One can even argue that the shapes taken by European colonisation, as against other non-European conquests and colonisation, were particularly brutalised by this thread of thought, as is the ethos of capitalism, too, which promotes self-interest as the only ‘progressive’ factor.

Given a deeply internalised worldview like this, it seems unsurprising to me that every once in a while some Western person enacts with a gun what the worldview suggests intellectually: that others are a nightmare to the self. The saddest thing is that it is a worldview the non-West is fast adopting.

(Tabish Khair, is PhD, DPhil, Associate Professor, Aarhus University, Denmark. He tweets @KhairTabish. This is an opinion article and the views expressed are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)